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BLACK HELICOPTERS EPISODE 38 SATURDAY the EIGHTH - 11:09 PM Anne lay back across the bed, gazed up towards the ceiling, which seemed to fade out into darkness even the candles couldn't penetrate. Henry was up there, somewhere, enjoying his dinner. Spiders and... snakes? And rats in the wall... there was a story that the Catfish had mentioned once in his book, by Poe. Which meant it would have ended badly for all involved. Or maybe it was another... |
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Andy
removed his shoes, let his toe feel around under the bed until it bumped up
against a thing. A guitar shaped thing. He reached down, pulled it up.
"Yukk!"
Anne responded. "Did the burglars smash that too?"
"Actually
no... it was trashed a long time ago. Otherwise, it would have been gone a
long time ago. Thing is... looks like shit, but it plays. Sort of..." and
he strummed a few chords of dubious provenance. He leaned back against the
wall, hoisting his feet up to make an X across Anne's body.
"Remember
our anarchists' song, from the U.?" he said before affecting a nasal
Brooklyn accent...
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"Oh... I'm the sorta guy, which likes
to roam around I organize the people, help to tear the
system down And when I find a boss, that scum which
pulls the strings I cut 'em and I blow 'em up, an' other ugly
things They call me the Wobbily! Yeah, I'm the
Wobbily... I roam from town to town to town to town... ...
dah dah, de dah, de dah... That's right, I'll roam from town to
town... Until the Revolution comes... dah dah, de
dah... And I'm as happy as a clown... For all the power that comes spurting... from the barrel of my gun... oh... I'm the kinda guy..." |
Abruptly
he let the guitar slip down, off the bed. "Anyway," he shrugged as
Anne wriggled sideways, hung both hands around him and kissed the side of his
neck. "Hey!" he exclaimed as she kicked a shoe to the floor.
"Pheww!" he recoiled. "Whatsamatta wit' you... career women
ain't supposed to have smelly feet..."
"I
can't help it!" Anne said, lying back on the cluttered bed, pushing more
papers over its edge. "I wear my soles out all day chasing stupid men,
this is the thanks I get? Foot criticism?"
"You've
got to stop being a fashion victim," he counseled.
"Naah...
I'm way, way down on the ladder of the hierarchy of victimization. Costa
Ricans, unwed mothers, people with environmental illnesses. Smelly, sore feet
are small potatoes. Easily satisfied," she added, raising her left hand a
few inches to stroke his back.
"Easily?"
Andy reached across, drew little circles over the nearest breast with his index
finger. "Looks to me like you're trying to climb up that ladder..."
"Meaning
being with you's worse than being with Glenn at the Ivona? Cut the crap,
kid," she said, punching him lightly on the shoulder.
"No,
it's true. Really! Fact is, I'm really crazy! I just don't care... all these
years of Nixonism, Reaganism, Clintonism, Bushshish... shischismism... just
blown my mind. Spinning down that helter-skelter, through the black Cobb-hole
to the dark neoliberal center of despair..."
"You
should quit the Sanctuary, get back into music," Anne suggested, rumpling
his hair. "Start one of those gothic metal rap bands, sing angry, pitiful
songs about suicide, spiders..."
"It
would be a choice. Probably no worse than the choices American
kids face today... go off to school, pick up a gun. Shoot yourself, waste the
teacher, classmates... or just go shooting into a crowd."
Anne
lifted her hand off his head, let it roam much further south. "Boys!...
and their guns..."
"I
mean..." Andy started, "...isn't this adultery, or something like
it?"
"We've
been over for years," Anne sighed. "The way I look at it..."
"How
about Glenn, how does he look at it?"
"You
never got out of the sixties! Glenn never got out of the eighties. Wants it
all! Anything he can grab on the side and some Stepford doll to crawl home
to... I mean, if we had a home. Sublet the condo in Maryland... this last year
we've been living out of hotels. Mostly good hotels, resorts even, but it's
blow into town... shmooze people into joining or at least thinking about
supporting the Coalition, take their money and move on dot con..."
"Doesn't
sound like the forty dollar door-to-door trip," Andy said.
"No
it's serious. Deadly serious!" she repeated, letting her wrist bounce on
Andy's groin like a zombie bouncing atop a trampoline.
"You
really are the people I've fantasized about shooting," Andy slipped into
the first person. "All these thoughts that flicker through my head at
night between the screams and sirens on the street... bodies running, flying,
I'm just turning around and pointing... there! There! Doing the peoples'
duty... nothing left beautiful or healthy whatsoever any more, so why the hell
not do a Virginia Tech? I feel! I understand the fascists now...
we romanticize victims, thinking they're better than us when we really know
that all they want out of life's a chance to turn the tables. Like the
Kosovars, or the shite Iraqis... that Zanzibar whoever, executing all the old
Saddam people..."
"That..."
Anne said, beginning to unbutton her silk blouse, "is about the strangest
pickup rap I've ever had dumped on me!"
"What
can I say?" Andy shrugged. "It's like the Bible tells you so... these
are the times to refrain from embracing. Of course it doesn't help that the
central metaphor for private life now is a disease..."
Anne
lifted her hand, raised it, slapped him sharply across the cheek. "Well,
fuck the Bible! How about Burger Jack... or back when it was just Burger
King... sometimes you gotta break the rules! It was Burger King,
wasn't it... or was it somebody's sneakers squeaking? And sneaking... I mean,
speaking about squeakers, maybe I should be asking if you've got any rubbers
around here?"
Andy
lurched to his left, straddled her. "Good show, jolly good show!" he
said, affecting a British accent. "Excellent question... even consummate!
Trying to extrapolate the consequences..."
"Andy,
lose the voice!"
"Huh?"
"The
voices!" Anne protested, "I hated it when you would use these phony
voices. Be yourself!"
"Milady,
I..."
"Glenn always uses the voices too, he
thinks I liked that about you, so he still imitates. Except that it's OK with
him... he doesn't have any self left to lose..."
"Maybe
while we are on the topic of prophylactics... new or used... I ought to be
asking you about Glenn," Andy said, the British voice spinning up and
away, like a bug towards Henry's web.
"His
only infection is power."
Andy
grunted, sat up to unzip his fly. "So late in life, then, we resort to
unsafe sex..."
"There
is no such thing as safe sex," Anne retorted, sharply. "Western
civilization would collapse without sexual inhibitions... outright prohibition
or sublimation through commodities, Jack says. If there was decent American
sex, we wouldn't have any art or culture, no economic progress. Crime, and the
proximity of death, these stimulate creativity."
Andy
looked over his shoulder. "Why do I get the feeling that you're slumming?"
"Because
this is a slum? Because you're so obsessed with running yourself
down in the service of some imaginary virtue... of romanticizing poverty and
powerlessness?"
"Glenn
was always the one who romanticized victims," Andy protested. "I,
frankly, despise them. Everybody who actually deals with the
situation does, too. It's easy to love the poor... at a distance." Andy
found himself staring at a sock he'd removed, twirling it between his fingers
and pondering. "Like two years ago, when he was here and asked me to find
him a homeless man for some PR stunt, white guy, middle-aged but not a bum, or
at least someone who could be cleaned up and passed off as a downsized middle
manager. I remember the whole spin, that was just after the Catfish got kicked
out of Congress..."
"He
retired," Anne objected.
"Whatever...
Glenn was going to get him this laid-off factory guy, no women, they would have
implied family desertion, which plays into the hands of Republicans or the
Democrats, depending on how you spin it. Middle aged homeless white guy,
preferably with a family... you weren't here," Andy added, "I think
he said you were out in California."
"Good!
At least I did something right."
"Boy,
did Glenn look shitfaced when the guy I found for him wanted to be paid
for being in all those photos and videos. As if it wasn't enough to just be
working for the good of God, the Catfish and America... Glenn might be a Conk
but he's really bureaucracy in action. Poor people exist to serve him!
You have your social service types to entertain and distract the unwanted,
charity to keep them from starving and embarrassing us in front of the
Unapissers..."
"Bread
and circuses," Anne pointed out, "wouldn't have been worth diddly
without the Roman Legions keeping the masses in line..."
"But
they shield the system from accountability," Andy began to protest when
Anne squirmed, arching her back and reaching beneath the bedspread to extract
an uncomfortable swath of anti-Conk propaganda that Andy had collected over the
past month. Fliers from the PLO, IRA and a dozen other initials with their
slogans, formal letters from Disson, bills...all of which, with Andy's
professorial jacket, were shoved over the edge of the bed while Anne pressed
her lips to his ear and whispered, harshly...
"Are
we gonna talk politics or fuck?"
And
finally he couldn't help but smile. "If you're positive that I'm not being
a homewrecker," he said, beginning to fumble with his shirt.
"What
home?" Anne interrupted. "At worst, a hotelwrecker. And let me...
I'll be careful," she slapped his hand away. "It doesn't impress me,
men ripping off their shirts. Glenn's done it too many times. You, on the other
hand, can't afford to be having shirts ripped off... trust me! I'll be careful,
that's a very nice shirt. The kind of shirt people used to wear to go down
South with, in, and get shot in. No homes to wreck. Glenn has to replicate the
people he sees on television or in magazine ads..."
"He
could be in a men's clothing ad, he's in better shape than I
am," Andy suggested, even as he loosened Anne's belt and began sliding her
Chanel skirt downwards. "Works out? And his hair's never out of place!
It's even better than the hair on the men, here, who read the news on
television..."
"Yeah,
but he wouldn't make it on TV... too twitchy. He needs to see a doctor, take
pills, but he won't... instead he drinks. And plays with his gun, everywhere...
that's what he says, my glass, my gal, my gun. His Henry!" she added,
wincing as Andy's teeth closed firmly around one nipple.
He
ran tongue down her breastslope... through the valley and back up the other.
"Here the brigadistas come," he whispered, "marching over the
hills of Costa Rica down to San Jose!" Her arms flailed briefly, then
plunged downwards, raking his bare back while he pulled his pants down, kicked
them off, raising his voice as he twisted atop her. "Resolutely the Red
Army drives towards the caves of Yunnan..."
He
grasped both her hips... she reached for his hair, then let it go, shaking the
loose strands that had come out over the side of the bed, gripping his buttocks
instead. "More!" she cried...
"In
a Parisian street, the people's battering-ram explodes against the gates of the
Bastille..."
"More!"
"In
the Costa Rican rainforest, Comandante Cuatro's massive anaconda squeezes
through the tentflaps of imperialist headquarters..."
She
bit his lip, but gently, he thrust left, then right, then left again. Their
coupling concluded in the instant that it takes for a political commercial to
flash onscreen... one of those hit pieces that proliferate during the witching
season between Halloween and Election Day when all argument and posture have
been boiled down to symbolism… waving flags, marching soldiers, screeching
clergymen. Still, her contractions kept
wringing every last drop of moisture out of his body... as if he were an orange
in a juicer... convulsions that broke his patter down to a series of incoherent
grunts, continuing even after he had offered up all that he had to give. The
mocking refrain of that old "Hot Rod Lincoln" rattled through his
brain... "all there is, and there ain't no more..." still she rocked,
heaved and thrust, finally throwing the weight of her body sideways to twist
Andy over, pin him on his back so he was left to look up into the dark,
flickering domain of candleglow and spiders, wondering what the hell he'd
gotten himself into, even as he heard the 'whup whup whup!' of another UNAPIS
helicopter somewhere over the street, between Anne's gasps, the old voices
skittering through his thoughts like rats in the hotel walls that kept assuring
him that it didn't matter...
Nothing
mattered...
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SATURDAY the EIGHTH - 11:17 PM
"Motherfuckers!"
Glenn
spat this out in the near-empty Satellite Lounge, three doors down from the
Ivona. His audience, a weary Massachusetts Conk, trying to close the deal on
the Ethics Caucus, winced and stared down into the swirling tremors of his
scotch and ice, recalling the old subliminal seduction hysteria... monsters
airbrushed into booze ads to torment vulnerable alcoholics into ordering
another drink. Now, he was a distressed, defeated and... of course... older
babysitter to semi-important madmen, measuring the longevity of his plight as a
lobster might contemplate the rising temperature of the pot he'd been summarily
dropped into.
"Whole
fuckin' Convention's laughing at us!" Glenn snarled. "And my woman?
She's out dancin' with all of ‘em... Colorado cowboys, all lined up to take a
poke at her? You know the Davis Mansion, where they're whooping it up... I picketed
that place once, when Kissinger came to town! Used to live here, you
know?"
"He
did? Really?" the Conk pretended
interest, surreptitiously checking his watch.
"Not
Kissinger," Glenn spat, "me! People from here know how to keep their
bitch in line, how to settle problems," Glenn said, with an ominous
determination. "Lemme tell you about this guy here, used to be big-shot,
name of Mark Cobb..."
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